You’ve probably noticed that public spaces are getting a little less public lately. The festive chaos of holiday markets, the spontaneous joy of browsing a craft fair—it’s slowly being fenced off. And we’re being told it’s for the greater good.
Take the Christmas Village in Philadelphia. For years, shoppers could step inside the wooden booths to chat with vendors and buy gifts out of the cold. Then, someone realized the booths weren’t fully ADA compliant. The organizers’ solution? They didn’t build permanent ramps. They banned everyone from entering the booths.
When the law decides that fairness means nobody gets to experience joy, we’ve officially built a dystopia.
The organizers had actually tried a middle ground: temporary ramps that staff could place out when a wheelchair user or someone with a walker needed them. It was a practical, human solution. But a small group objected, arguing that needing assistance to enter a booth was inherently demeaning. So, rather than face a lawsuit, the city capitulated. No one gets in. Everyone shops from the outside looking in.
You know how this story ends. The disabled community didn’t win a better, more integrated experience. They just lost the experience alongside everyone else. The only winner was risk management.
Compliance is never about lifting people up; it’s about lowering the ceiling until everyone is equally miserable.
You’ve seen this movie before. It’s the exact same playbook UC Berkeley ran a few years ago. The university was offering thousands of free, high-quality online course videos to the public. A complaint was filed because the videos lacked closed captioning. Berkeley’s response? They didn’t get funding to caption the videos. They just deleted the entire library. The disabled community didn’t get access to free education. The world just lost access to free education.
This is the dark underbelly of our civil-rights framework. The stated goal of accessibility laws is to broaden access. But when legal compliance is cheaper than actual inclusive design, the rational response of any institution is to equalize down. If we can’t make it perfect for everyone, we make it available to no one.
We have traded a culture of shared joy for a culture of shared liability.
The real fight here isn’t between disabled shoppers and non-disabled shoppers. It’s between all of us and a compliance system that treats accessibility as a lawsuit-avoidance exercise rather than a design standard. It’s a Harrison Bergeron reality, where equality is violently flattened into sameness, and the only ones who benefit are the bureaucrats and the lawyers.
We should be furious. Not at the people asking for access, but at a system that would rather delete a shared public joy than actually fund the infrastructure to include everyone. If we don’t stop treating accessibility as a liability checklist, our public spaces will keep shrinking until there’s nothing left to share.
FAQ
Q: But isn't temporary assistance inherently unequal?
A: Yes, needing to ask for a ramp is a friction point. But deleting the experience for everyone doesn't remove the friction; it just removes the joy. True equity requires funding permanent design, not enforcing shared deprivation.
Q: What's the practical implication for businesses?
A: If your event or space isn't fully accessible, you are a lawsuit target. Instead of investing in inclusive design, many will choose the cheaper route: shutting down the feature entirely to avoid liability.
Q: Are you saying accessibility laws are bad?
A: No, the intent is noble. The execution is a disaster. When the legal framework incentivizes destroying public access rather than funding inclusive infrastructure, the law becomes a weapon against the very people it claims to protect.